The Rush Limbaugh Boycott Is A Miserable Failure. Ha, Ha, Ha!

Oh, the Left was so happy. This time, they were finally going to get Rush Limbaugh!

He had made the mistake of calling a left-wing activist a slut. While in most cases, calling a woman a slut or a whore is way over-the-line, it didn’t acttually seem all that inappropriate in this case. Personally, I don’t consider it misogynistic at all to speculate about the sex life of a woman who asks Congress to help pay for her birth control because she thinks no human being could reasonably be expected to spend as much as she has to on it.

Anyway, Sandra Fluke and other liberals who were DELIGHTED by all the attention she was getting, pretended to be offended and started trying to get Rush’s sponsors to cancel. Soon, the claims about the numbers of sponsors “cancelling” started to rise, Rush apologized, and liberals thought they had him on the ropes. This time Rush Limbaugh was over, done, finished, kaput.

However, when you look a little closer, you can’t help but notice a lot of their “cancellations” look pretty shifty. Take Allstate’s “cancellation” for example.

Allstate’s advertising purchase strategy has not included the Rush Limbaugh Show. Earlier today, we responded to inquiries about our advertising relationship with the show by stating we did not advertise on or sponsor it. As radio listeners notified us that they were hearing Allstate ads during the show this afternoon, we contacted the vendor that arranges for our advertising placements and discovered that an error had been made and advertising time had mistakenly been purchased for the show.

We regret providing mistaken information about this situation. We have asked our media buying firm to correct the error by discontinuing any advertising on the Rush Limbaugh Show moving forward in keeping with our original advertising plans and strategies.

Translation: Allstate bought a block of advertising on a station or stations that had Rush Limbaugh on it. Intentionally or unintentionally, Allstate’s ads ran on Rush’s show locally. Allstate called and asked that the ads run on shows other than Rush’s for now. Total money lost for the station? Zero. Total money lost for Rush, who makes no money off of local ads anyway? Zero.

Rush DID lose national sponsors, but keep in mind, he’s such a power player that he makes $50 million a year. Losing a few national sponsors or having 2-3 that don’t renew is like giving a paper cut to an elephant. These people who think they’re wiping Rush out are like a couple of ticks thinking they’re about to drain a great dane dry.

But I know that many of you are spending a lot of time — God bless you — on the Web doing what you can to express your support for the program. And judging from the reaction of my own brother, who sends me a note last night, “You really lost 28 sponsors?” No, we have not lost 28 sponsors. “Well, how can they say it?” Because they lie and because they don’t understand how it works, and that’s what I want to try and explain. In fact, folks, we have three brand-new sponsors that will be starting in the next two weeks. Now, obviously, I’m not gonna tell you who they are today, but we’ve got three brand-new, full-fledged sponsors starting in the next two weeks.

Two of the sponsors who have canceled have asked to return. We are being very careful about that. Not gonna give you any names here. One of them is practically begging to come back. Everything is fine on the business side. Everything’s cool. There is not a thing to worry about.

… We have not lost 28 national sponsors. There are not 28 advertisers who were paying us who aren’t anymore. They are local commercial buys. Many of them may not even be running in my show to begin with. The advertisers are just saying, “If they are, pull ‘em. We don’t want ‘em in there for now,” but they’re staying on the local stations. These advertisers are not abandoning EIB affiliates.

…Nobody is losing money here, including us, in all this. And that is key for you to understand. They are not canceling the business on our stations. They’re just saying they don’t want their spots to appear in my show. We don’t get any revenue from ‘em anyway.

…Now, let me put this in further perspective for you, this number of 28 or 32, and then we’re gonna move on to other things. Sponsors of our program are both nationwide companies, like Two If By Tea (my tea company), and local companies, like “Mike’s Auto Body Repair” or a local bank. If we added up all of our affiliates (let’s choose the number 600) and we assumed that each of those affiliates had 30 such sponsors in the course of our three-hour program, there might be — all across this country — as many as 18,000 different sponsors of this program. Let me put it another way: There might be 18,000 different people buying advertising within this program alone.

…Twenty-eight sponsors out of 18,000! That’s like losing a couple of french fries in the container when it’s delivered to you at the drive-thru. You don’t even notice it.

… Now, you might say, “Well, whatever it is, these people are putting out statements.” Yes, they’re putting out statements because they’re hoping to make political gains — and it’s gonna backfire. You can look at the stock price of some of these companies.

That last sentence is a reference to Carbonite which, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, hasn’t fared so well since it made a big deal of dropping advertising on Rush’s program.

Since the market opened on Monday through its close today, Carbonite stock (NASDAQ:CARB) has plummeted nearly 12 percent, outpacing the drop of the NASDAQ index in that same time period by nine-and-a-half points. It was also one of the biggest decliners on the NASDAQ on Tuesday.

This boycott may actually end up HELPING Rush because what’s going on with Carbonite is giving people the idea that Rush’s show can have a massive impact, both positive and negative, on the price of a company’s stock. Now that would be ironic…